Determining the three-dimensional position of Mars Express in space with as much precision as possible, at a distance of 155 million kilometres away from Earth, is no simple business.

If the Solar System were shrunk down so that Earth was only the size of a soccer ball, then Mars Express would be a speck of dust floating well over two kilometres away!

ESA ground stations have kept track of the spacecraft’s range and velocity ever since launch.

By measuring the ‘Doppl

Argonne researchers use specialized instrument

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have reached for the stars – and seen what’s inside.

Argonne scientists, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Chicago, Washington University and the Universita di Torino in Italy, examined stardust from a meteorite and found remnants of now-extinct technetium atoms made in stars long ago.

The stardust grains are tiny bit

Scientists at JILA, a joint laboratory of the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU-Boulder) report the first observation of a “fermionic condensate” formed from pairs of atoms in a gas, a long-sought, novel form of matter. Physicists hope that further research with such condensates eventually will help unlock the mysteries of high-temperature superconductivity, a phenomenon with the potential to improve energy ef

On Friday the 30th, during the XLII international winter meeting on nuclear physics at Bormio, the first results will be announced of Finuda experiment (Nuclear Physics at Daphne), settled in Frascati at Infn National Laboratories.

Planned and made operating by a group of about forty physicists from Universities and Infn Sites of Bari, Brescia, Frascati, Pavia, Torino and Trieste, Finuda is devoted to the study of hypernuclei: nuclei composed by three different kinds of particles rather the

Scientists are finding a computer program called Elves to be a nearly magical solution to the tedious and time-consuming task of determining the 3-D shape of proteins – a major focus of cutting-edge proteomics today – from X-ray diffraction data.

According to Elves developer James Holton, who recently received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, researchers can unleash Elves on a set of X-ray diffraction data and go on to other things – or take a nap – while the computer

ESA’s X-ray observatory, XMM-Newton, has imaged a spectacular set of rings which appear to expand, with a speed a thousand times faster than that of light, around the point in the sky where a powerful gamma-ray explosion took place in early December. This is the first time that such a fascinating event, called an `echo’, has been seen in X-ray wavelengths.

This echo forms when the powerful radiation of a gamma-ray burst, coming from far away, crosses a slab of dust in our Galaxy and is sca

Since most criminals only strike when they aren’t being watched, reliable surveillance of homes and businesses is a round-the-clock job. A University of Rhode Island researcher has made that job considerably easier and less expensive, thanks to a new technology he developed that can automatically track moving objects in real time.

Using low-cost, commercially available hardware, the Automatic Image Motion Seeking (AIMS) camera follows a moving object and keeps the target at the center of the

Rosetta is scheduled to be launched on board an Ariane-5 rocket on 26 February from Kourou, French Guiana.

Originally timed to begin about a year ago, Rosetta’s journey had to be postponed, as a precaution, following the failure of a different version of Ariane-5 in December 2002. This will be the first mission to orbit and land on a comet, one of the icy bodies that travel throughout the Solar System and develop a characteristic tail when they approach the Sun.

This del

An international team of physicists has provided the best evidence to date of the existence of a new form of atomic matter, dubbed the “pentaquark.” The research team confirmed the existence of pentaquarks by using a different approach that greatly increased the rate of detection compared to previous experiments. The results are published as the cover story in today’s issue of the journal Physical Review Letters.

“The latest, and most conclusive evidence of this five-quark particle — the ‘pe

To carry out simultaneuos observations with several telescopes and transform the combined data into pictures from distant galaxies has so far been a cumbersome procedure which often has taken a long time.

Now a breakthrough has been achieved by way of the installation of optical fibre links between the observatories and the universities who have access to the national and international research networks.

On Thursday 15 January 2004, the first e-VLBI experiment took place between O

Like a doctor trying to understand an elderly patient’s sudden demise, astronomers have obtained the most detailed observations ever of an old but otherwise normal massive star just before and after its life ended in a spectacular supernova explosion.

Imaged by the Gemini Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope (HST) less than a year prior to the gigantic explosion, the star is located in the nearby galaxy M-74 in the constellation of Pisces. These observations allowed a team of European

The discovery of a unique phenomenon: a beautiful set of expanding X-ray halos surrounding a gamma-ray burst which have never been seen before, (see Movie link at end), has been announced by an international team of astronomers led by Dr Simon Vaughan of the University of Leicester. The research has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRB) are the most energetic form of radiation in the Universe and can be used to probe any material between Earth and

What if a personal computer knew how its user is feeling?

That computer on your desk is just your helper. But soon it may become a very close friend. Now it sends your e-mails, links you to the Web, does your computations, and pays your bills. Soon it could warn you when you’re talking too much at a meeting, if scientists at Sandia National Laboratories’ Advanced Concepts Group have their way. Or it could alert others in your group to be attentive when you have something imp

Until recently, researchers and their assistants spent countless hours poring over seemingly endless volumes of journals and scientific literature for information pertinent to their studies in fields such as cancer, AIDS, pediatrics and cardiology.

But thanks to new software developed by bioinformatics researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, scientists can now easily identify obscure commonalities in research data and directly relate them to their studies, saving money and

Mars Express, ESA’s first mission to Mars, will reach its final orbit on 28 January. It has already been producing stunning results since its first instrument was switched on, on 5 January. The significance of the first data was emphasised by the scientists at a European press conference today at ESA’s Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt, Germany.

“I did not expect to be able to gather together – just one month after the Mars Orbit Insertion of 25 December – so many happy scientists eager to

Grid computing is one of the hot topics in distributed computing. Using a Grid of computers, located around the world, it is possible to carry out truly massive calculations. To achieve this requires a high level of interoperability between computer systems. Addressing this is IST project GRIP. Its system will be used to enable the European Weather services to share resources and allow applications the resources for which are beyond the capabilities of a single service.

Grid computing is o